It's my birthday, and I wanted to pop in to share some things that I just adore right now.
Each of them would make amazing gifts, to a friend, or even to yourself.
You'll see a theme through them all, beautiful, cozy, happy, and healthy (besides the cake and the coffee, but it's my birthday and I can choose cake, and I need coffee).

1.  Starbucks holiday spice flat white.
I am a die hard black coffee girl.  Add a splash of almond milk or half and half and I'm good.  I have never been a card carrying member of the pumpkin spice club.  I did not want to like this drink.  I did not want to dream about this drink.  It is made of magic and unicorns and I cannot quit it.
2.  This faux leather hoodie from Target.
If I could sleep in this jacket I would.  It is basically a cozy hoodie masquerading as a very polished and intentional leather jacket.  I wear it nearly every day.  Nearly every day I get stopped and asked about it.  I also get asked if I am headed somewhere special.  It is a brilliant way to trick everyone into thinking you are put together when really you are wearing a hoodie.
3.  Bambu Earth
I am not 21 any more.  Nor am I  21 times two.  I finally decided to get serious about taking care of my skin, and Bambu Earth has been a game changer.  I could go on for one million sentences, and I will share more about it soon, but I feel like my skin looks better than it did years ago.  I feel better about it too, knowing that each ingredient I am putting on my skin is safe, holistic, and sustainabily sourced.  Right now the petitgrain moisturizer is LIFE.
4.  Little sheet cakes from Trader Joe's.
No words.  They are not pretty.  I would never pick them up on my own.  A friend raved about them and I didn't believe her.  Until I tried them.  Now I cannot stay away.  Coming from a proud and professed frosting snob, this is huge.
5. Joycharee
Right up there with cleaning up my skin care, I have slowly begun to clean up my makeup.  This will be a little bit of a slower process and investment, but I know it will be well worth it.  I'm starting with the undereye concealer because life.
6. Sand and Starfish bracelets.
Each Christmas I buy a huge bunch of these diffuser bracelets from Sand and Starfish, and each year I wish that I bought more.  They are beautiful and functional.  Love.
7.  Lularoe leggings.
If you haven't drank the koolaid yet, do it.  Can leggings change your life?  Yes.
8.  Cholula hot sauce.
This lady and her hot sauce will always be my favorite. The Tapatio guy is more famous, but I'm with her.  I start to panic when the bottle gets below half full.  Running out is a red level emergency.  I put it on pretty much everything.
9.  Accupressure mat and pillow.
I had a significant work related injury in my early twenties, and I have been dealing with chronic neck pain for nearly half my life.  I recently tried an accupressure mat, and now I wish my world was made from those little spikes.  I don't know how it works and I don't care.  I just know it is helping me immensely.
10.  Laurane Elisabeth Designs.
Laurane has been my jewelry crush forever.  I invited here to sell her creations at a pop up shop at my house just so I could shop.  Here earrings are handmade, lightweight and stunning.  They are part of my daily uniform, and I will sob ugly tears if I ever lose one.
11.  Doublehood sweatshirts from Mindy Mae's Market.
Circling back to hoodies.  They are my everything.  These doublehoods from Mindy Mae's Market take hoodie fashion up a notch.  Beautiful, flattering, long enough to wear with leggings, and thumbholes.  They had me at thumbholes.

Find a treat for yourself, find a treat for a friend, eat some cake... I'm off to celebrate.

Jason grew up with the glorious weekly taco night tradition, and his mother taught him to fry corn tortilla shells.  We occasionally made them for friends and family, but most Tuesdays you could find us at one of our favorite Mexican restaurants letting someone else do the cooking.
When we began to dream of what it would look like to fill our table each week, tacos seemed to be the only option even worth considering.

If you think about it, they are the perfect food.  Unless you are a robot, I am pretty sure you have no ethical or emotional objection to tacos.  They are fully customizable, gluten free, and just basically bring happiness to one and all.

I have a shelf in the pantry for taco staples, and everything else we need can be grabbed in a five minute grocery trip.  It's not fancy, but it is easy, and the prep has become part of my muscle memory.

Pull the meat out of the freezer, pick up sour cream, avocados, tomatoes, lettuce and Mission white corn tortillas (there is no other choice, no other brand.  Ride or die.)  Open the pantry and gather a can of beans for cheater restaurant beans, taco seasoning, and Rice-a-Roni Mexican rice (never ever Spanish, we only made that mistake once.)

 Half an hour before our new friends are coming over I start the rice and beans.  Then when the doorbell rings Jason starts making chips and shells.  Bar stools at the kitchen island are pulled out, water glasses come down from the cabinet, I start the chopping and guacamole, we share stories and ask questions.  Sometimes the kids are sent out to the trampoline or pool, sometimes they are in the other room playing the Wii.  Every time small hands walk by for handfuls of chips.  So many handfuls of chips.

This taco ritual involves everyone.  There is chopping, grabbing the arsenal of hot sauce choices, the filling different taco combinations for each kid.  All the while life is being lived. We find out how people met, what they dream about, and how they wandered into the school auditorium one Sunday.  We laugh, we cry, we make a mess, we pile the dishes in the sink.

It is by far my favorite night of the week.  It is chaotic, often noisy, and it is the good stuff.  Before we know it bedtime creeps up on us and we say our goodbyes.  Knowing that every taco shared that night is part of the story of our family's life.
What does this have to do with Tacos & Tees? Everything.  It is everything I am and everything I love. Jesus. Family. Others. Mexican food. Sarcasm.  Whether lyrics from my favorite hymn, or my commentary on the current political mess, this is me.  And it is about so much more than tacos.

I want to introduce my big, scary, dream come true.  Something decades in the making, something that I have stopped and started more times than I can count.  Something that seemed equally possible impossible.  It just took someone to look me in the eyes and ask why not just try?

So try I did.  I took the files that have been hiding in a folder on my desktop.  The ones that I have been dreaming of and working on for longer than I can remember, and I did something with them.  Then I added some more.  I bought a domain.  Set up an Instagram account and Facebook page.  I ordered business cards. I did a test run.  And now I have a t-shirt company.

Is this real life?

In case you are like me, who loves a good origin story, I designed my first t-shirt my sophomore year of high school.  Eons before Photoshop and really any useful graphic programs, it was just me and whatever art supplies I had on hand.  I took my design and drove it to the local screen printer in my 1979 Volvo station wagon.  A week later I picked them up, and the Trabuco Hills High School swim team had official shirts.

Fast forward a few years, I start dating a boy, who happened to be a drummer, who's band happened to need people to man the merchandise booth.  At the time the booth was actually not a booth, just shirts piled on whatever table the venue gave them.  I enlisted the help of my mom, and together we sketched out a plan, purchased PVC pipes and built the Supertones first merch booth.  My friends and I painted the banner, because free labor is way cheaper than a sign shop. 
Pretty much every weekend you could find us here.  It still holds some of my fondest memories.
And perhaps my least fond hair color.

Since then I have steered clear of the boxed hair dye at CVS, and designed the occasional shirt for church, for adoption fundraisers, etc.  Each time I would design one, the dream in my heart would be rekindled, and then pushed away.  One of the main factors was the fact that I had yet to find a soft, durable, flattering shirt, that washed well.  I knew that if I were to pursue this dream, I could only stand behind a shirt that I would actually wear. Know that I am extraordinarily picky.  I have too many shirts that started off soft, and then pilled after a wear or two.  Or even worse the kind that when you buy them they are portrait shaped, and after one wash they are landscape.  NO.  I finally came across the brand Bella+Canvas.  With that discovery I knew that this dream could finally happen.

So here I am, a girl standing in front of you with a bunch of t-shirts, asking you to love them.
Because I really, really do.

Tomorrow I will share where the name came from, and the heart of what I plan to do with this adventure.
Eeeeeek!

I can't stop talking, or thinking about the new show This is Us.  I don't know what the season holds, or if it will end up taking the place in my heart held by my all time favorite show Friday Night Lights (Tami Taylor is my spirit animal), but if anything it has by far the most beautifully written scene I have ever watched.  It should be required viewing for every OB, every parent who has faced loss, and really every person that breathes oxygen.

When we lost Joy, our OB lacked the skills, experience, and empathy to offer any comfort.  It is a deeply painful part of our story.  When faced with the most tragic moment of our young lives, we were met with cold, clinical words as she swiftly left the room, and handed us off to a doctor we had never met.  I would like to believe that there are many doctors out there who have been profoundly changed and shaped by tragedy, and have found strength and redemption from it.  I feel like Dr. Katowsky was speaking directly to me.  Saying the words that I wish I could have heard all those years ago.  Words that are strong and hopeful and true.  Words that echo each time I share what I have learned about loss and change and how we became different people that dark January day.  People that brought our daughter home from the hospital, just not in the way we had hoped.

So I sat myself down at the computer and through tear filled eyes I made a printable.  These words are simple, have been said in a million different ways, but they are words I didn't even know that I needed to hear.  Maybe you needed to hear them too, and maybe even see them in your home.
Printable available here.

 These are the faces of a happy church planting family headed up to Forest Home for a week of family camp. The car is packed with everything we need for hikes, and play, and bible studies, and memories.  What you can't see is how weighed down the car is with pain, struggle, regret, expectations, and hopelessness.


 The week came at a time when it was everything we didn't know we needed.
As humans, as Americans, as Southern Californians, and especially as Christians, we bought into the lie that we couldn't easily share our struggles, be transparent with our desperation, that we couldn't admit how much we needed help.


 I was deeply depressed.  The feeling was not new to me.  It has been a frequent visitor in my life, it's grip was familiar, and I kept trying to keep it at bay.  We had been so stretched thin with a season of loss when our pastor left the church we had called home for over dozen years, with confusion as everything we knew there changed, with fear as God called us to the unknown waters of church planting.  Jason and I found ourselves at war with each other, when from the outside everything looked so beautiful and magical.  We fought through nap times, through the midnight hours, across from each other on a therapist's couch.


 The drought that has crippled California had nothing on the drought that was crippling our marriage, the desolation that was bleeding over into every aspect our lives.  Our parenting, our friendships, our relationship with God.


 For our kids to make new memories, new friends, have new experiences.  I truly didn't expect anything more.  The pain became a blanket that I had wrapped around my shivering shoulders, afraid to take off.


 Between meals, campfire chats, worship, hikes, bible studies, and chocolate chip shakes, God found a way to bring a glimmer of hope into our darkness.


 Between hikes, fireside chats, paddleboarding and face painting, there were desperate prayers, raw conversations, and healing.


 There are morning hikes.  Friends praying for you.  A creation so beautiful that it could only have been made by a brilliant creator.


 There are smiles.  There are tears.  There is coffee.  There are pancakes.


 There are CCA's who love your kids, bring backpacks full of games, make them laugh, and put them to bed.  All while you are having life changing deep, painful, raw conversations under a star filled sky.


 There are cozy cabins, and a week of delicious meals prepped for you.  Even meals to please your picky and dramatic child who hates pretty much everything that isn't pizza, cereal, or croutons.

 There is a light filled chapel that I visited when I was a camper in high school.  God met me then.  He met me there again.  Alone, I cried out to Him.  For strength.  For hope.  For healing.  For Him to write the story of our marriage.  The story of our family.  To be the God of the impossible.  To make beauty out of the ashes.




Summer Family Camp 2015 // August 9-14 from Forest Home on Vimeo.

The love for Bass Lake runs deep in my family. It is an enduring legacy that it has woven through the past 75 years, and once again we found ourselves on it shores, which thankfully have benefited from the substantial rainfall Northern California received this winter.
It was the perfect kickoff for a summer full of adventure, full of road trips, and full of exploring new and sweetly familiar places.   

We always day trip into Yosemite.  This year we hiked to Mirror Lake instead of making the drive to Glacier Point.  Because there was WATER!!!!
 Speaking of water, the Merced was flowing, and the rafting was safe but oh so fun.  Especially when this pink haired sunshine found herself caught on the wrong side shore, and rescued by another helpful family.  There is something so special about being in the outdoors, surrounded by the wonder and the beauty, everyone seems friendlier, and helpful. Life is better outdoors.
 We added a new facet to this year's trip, we decided (and by we, I masterminded the plan and somehow convinced Jason to add a day to the trip to go along with it.) to take the back route home through Tuolumne Meadows, and I wondered where it has been all my life.
 Then there is Tuolumne Meadows.  The elevation is high, the crowds are low.  There is beauty and wonder, and wildlife wherever you look.  I cannot believe I have never been there.  I cannot wait to come back.
 There is nobody I would rather road trip, hike, and adventure with.  I love that our kids love the Sierras as much as we do.  I love that they are a part of their story.
Lu is my yoga hero, and she is working on a little project for our friend Casey.  Her dancer pose is pretty much my life goal.

Another life goal of mine is to start shooting more video.  As much as love photos, there is something so specail about home movies.  Knowing that I have a professional level video camera in my pocket at all times gives me no excuse not to use it.  You will see our dear friends the Johnsons, who are family to us, and have gladly drank the Bass Lake and Yosemite koolaid with us.  All footage was shot with my iPhone 6s & GoPro and edited together as we drove home in the iMovie app.  Seriously.  Go shoot some video.  You will never regret it.  While you are at it, head to the Sierras.  I'll meet you there.